I'm an agro-ecologist based at the University of Leeds, with interests in sustainable agriculture, land management and food production. My research has addressed competition between arable weeds and crops; the impacts of farming systems on biodiversity (including organic and GM); national surveys of biodiversity and land use; the assessment of ecosystem services from agricultural land; systems for measuring and monitoring ecological processes; defining and measuring the concept of sustainable intensification of farming and ensuring a sustainable and secure system of food supply for cities.

If you want to look at my photos (including of research sites and visits) you have come to the wrong place - you should be here

The world's large agricultural experiment?I was interviewed by Nature to comment on a new experiment contrasting contemporary farming with the use of targeted farm management, using models, undertaken by smallholders from across China. I was blown away by the sheer scale of the study. I said, “This is an astonishing project of a scale way beyond anything I am familiar with”. While this kind of work "would clearly have benefits across sub-Saharan Africa, but an approach is needed that crosses borders, organizations and funders.” See my blog about whether we can use big data approaches to avoid the need for such experiments; my feeling is no, or at leasy not yet.

Can organic farming feed the world?It depends. New studies are coming out that try to find out whether organic farming can indeed provide the food we need; I commented in the Guardian that "One of the question marks about organic farming is that it can’t feed the world. [This paper] concludes organic farming does require more land than conventional methods, but if we manage the demand for food by reducing waste and reducing the amount of crops grown as animal feed, organic farming can feed the world.“[These] models can only be viewed as a guide: there are many assumptions that may not turn out to be true and all these scenario exercises are restricted by limited knowledge [and] are fairly simplistic compared to real life, but realistic enough to help formulate policy. The core message is valuable and timely: we need to seriously consider how we manage the global demand for food.”